Crossfit Image: Lyndon Marceau / Incite Images

When you join Crossfit, you don’t so much join a gym as join a “team”.

The sport of Crossfit is a gym workout turned into a race against the clock, and against other Crossfitters – a new breed of fitness buffs who shun expensive machines in glitzy surrounds in favour of more basic  gym activities in converted warehouses and garages around Australia, and around the world. They say that when you join Crossfit, you don’t so much join a gym as join a “team”. Utilising social media to form associations and record progress, this new band also gets together in a series of competitions that lead all the way up to World Championships, held this month in LA (July 13-15). Inside Sport recently witnessed the Reebok Regional  finals at the WIN Entertainment Centre in Wollongong, which decided our contenders for the title of Fittest Man/Woman on Earth. Its basic philosophy is summed up in 100 words by its founder, Greg Glassman: “Eat meat and vegetables, nuts and seeds, some fruit, little starch and no sugar. Keep intake levels that will support exercise but not body fat. Practise and train major lifts: deadlift, clean, squat, presses, clean and jerk and snatch. Similarly, master the basics of gymnastics: pull-ups, dips, rope climb, push-ups, sit-ups, presses to handstand, pirouettes, flips, splits and holds. Bike, run, swim, row, etc, hard and fast. Five or six days per week, mix these elements in as many patterns as creativity will allow. Routine is the enemy. Keep workouts short and intense. Regularly learn and play new sports.” And that’s it. But we asked our winner, the “fittest woman in Australia”, 22-year-old Kara Gordon, from Brisbane, to expand.

BEGINNINGS

“I was very sporty as a kid. I was a swimmer all through primary school and on my way to a higher level but sort of lost interest. I guess I thought I was too cool and wanted to hang out with friends instead. I always had a competitive sporting instinct, definitely, but I got a bit sidetracked and a bit lost. So when I was 19, I went back and joined a regular gym. I spent a lot of time running on the treadmill and riding the bike – because all I was interested in was losing weight and toning up. Typical girl stuff.

“Then I met a personal trainer, Brian Bucholtz. Brian wanted to get me into everything, so I tried a kickboxing class at his suggestion and loved it. That brought out my competitive side. Then Brian opened his own gym, Crossfit Roar, in February last year, and that’s when my

life really changed.”

CROSSFIT

“We have a poster up in the front of our gym, and it’s Crossfit all over: it says, ‘Motivated people only. Leave your ego at the door. ’ Crossfit is about people of every age, both genders, every size you could imagine, all coming in for the one purpose: to challenge yourself and make yourself feel better. There are no mirrors in our gyms. Looking at yourself in a mirror is not going to achieve anything; we want people to focus on what they’re doing. We don’t use a whole lot of equipment – the idea when you come in for our workouts is to be prepared for anything.

“We try to move functionally – how our body is supposed to move. We actually use our bodies as the tool. Though we do add weight, of course.

“It’s like joining a club rather than joining a gym. We don’t even like to call it a gym – we call it a box. It really does feel like a club, a sport, where you come together on the same team. We’re a family. We all see each other just about every day, and we help each other, because we’re all on this path together.

“That’s the whole idea of having one set workout a day, which we all do together. That’s not to say newcomers do all the exercises as prescribed: within that workout we have scaling options, so you can scale down: someone might have an injury or be not quite as strong, and maybe not as fast or a different age – whatever the reason there’s the option to scale back. That’s why it’s good – we’re doing it as one, but always to our own ability, so you’re competing against yourself.”

Crossfit Image: Lyndon Marceau / Incite Images

FIRST TIME

“You’re always going to be nervous going in the first time – newcomers might think they’re not going to be able to do it. And that’s our job as coaches. We have introductory sessions where we’ll go through the whole thing. You’re given a  basic workout to get a taste of it, and then you come back for a session. It’s definitely a journey for those first few weeks, and it does take a lot of compassion from the coaches to support people through that because it does take time. People are always worried about what others are going to think; we reassure them that everyone was in their shoes when they first started. But I haven’t yet met anyone who cannot do Crossfit. I haven’t met anyone it doesn’t suit. You can see videos all over the internet of people doing Crossfit – some with injuries or disabilities. You work around that. Give anyone a chance, let them enjoy something different, push all stereotypes and assumptions out of the way, and they enjoy it and stick by it.  The amount of people who have said it’s changed their life ... I’m one of them.”

COMPETITION

“Around October last year, Brian came to me and asked if I’d like to join him as a coach – I had realised that this is something I’m going to do for the rest of my life – I won’t care how slow I’m doing it. I think he saw that. It wasn’t planned – just meant to be.

“There’s always a healthy amount of competition in the workouts, but it’s to a different level. It’s fun. People like to push against each other, and if they didn’t have that class environment then I guess they’d struggle to get to new levels. You might not compete directly against the people around you, but you compete against the achievements they’ve made and try and make that same level.

“Around the country, gyms have comps to promote themselves or get the Crossfit community together. It’s all in the spirit of fun, and if someone wins, you just appreciate how hard they’ve worked because you know yourself how hard it was.

“I’d only been going three months or so when I learned about the open, online, worldwide comp last year. They release one workout a week for six weeks. You do each of them, get your times validated by your gym, and then the top 60 men and women go on to Regionals. Brian said it only costs five bucks to register, so give it a crack and see where you’re at. Well, I made it into the top 60 and went down to Sydney and competed there. I faced a whole new world of challenges. But I used it as an experience, and finished 19th. I didn’t qualify for the World Games, but I definitely got a fire in my belly after that.

“I’ll never forget one of the workouts that I had. The deadlift was much heavier than anything I had ever achieved in training; you have to complete the one exercise before you can move on to the next workout, and there’s usually two or three to complete in total. I had to do 21 of those deadlifts at a weight I’d never lifted before. I really struggled with it, but I just pushed through it and learnt so much about myself. It was a real challenge for me, but I didn’t have a choice but to try my hardest. I had girls cheering me on who I’d never met before; the entire crowd was cheering me on – and from then on I knew that this is what I wanted to do.”

Crossfit Kara Gorden Image: Lyndon Marceau / Incite Images

MORE  ENERGY 

“A lot of Crossfitters follow the Paleolithic diet – they call it the ‘caveman’ style of eating, going back to that period where we all ate clean, basic, natural food: nuts and seeds and meat. You exclude dairy and grains and any processed food. A lot of people find it very beneficial. I’ve tried it out for myself – I’ve found I did have to adjust it a little bit, but the basic structure of the diet is quite sound and quite easy to follow.

“A lot of people soon notice a pretty dramatic change in their body shape. Especially losing

the dairy and grains, you tend to lose a lot of puffiness – the skin freshens up. When you add in some weight training and intense physical activity, your body just takes form into how it needs to be and starts to function properly. Your body is using energy as it should and storing only what it needs.”

RECORD BOOKS

“I definitely didn’t expect to be setting any world records at Regionals, and certainly not on the first day. That workout, on paper, really shouldn’t have been my best – it wasn’t supposed to be my strength. But I just had a lot of fun with it. It was a 2km row, followed by 50 pistol squats, followed by 30 hang cleans at 60kg. It was very tricky – I knew the row was going to be a bit tedious, but I knew the other movements were going to be fun. My time was 11min, 56sec. It was a great start to the weekend – a real confidence-booster.”

TOMORROW THE WORLD

“So yeah! I won the final and just got named Australia’s Fittest Woman – but I just think of me as Kara. I guess that feeling is going to take a while to get used to. I’m still waiting for that moment when I realise what’s happened. But it’s very exciting to be heading to the Worlds. I’ve got to have no regrets. I’m going to go in there and trust in myself and push it as hard as I can.”

      ‒ Graem Sims